Monday, June 29, 2009

Cinema Violente

Scanning the cable movie listings recently I was struck by the collective violence in the short descriptions of that night's movies.

Documentaries and animations and comedies were there, Horton the elephant was even there, but they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of violent language: killer, murder, tragic, sadistic, relentless, vicious, violent, mutilated, brutal, amoral, gruesome, psychotic, hideous, and on and on.

The majority of the films were action-oriented and murderous. I'm as used to, and immune to, this stuff as anybody who watches movies, but that night it reached a critical mass. So I decided to extract a selection of descriptive phrases from those cable movie listings to serve as a contemplation on entertainment in our culture.

The extract that most caught my attention with its bizarrely mundane presentation of the plot was this: "His drinking starts to interfere with his assassination duties...." So, is this a fall-down-drunk-and-couldn't-hit-the-side-of-a-barn comedy? Or are assassins now presented as skilled high achievers -- as long as they manage their drinking?

I planned to list some of the other phrases I extracted from the movie listing to show how they are individually more or less commonplace, but how they collectively describe a film industry and a culture drunk on violence. (There's that drinking problem again.) But I think we've all seen enough of that stuff.

Instead, here's a video essay on how the mpaa film rating system is much more tolerant of violence than of sexual content in films.


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